Resilience and Memory in the Poetics of Africadia: Sylvia D. Hamilton's And I Alone Escaped To Tell You
Keywords:
Memory, Resilience, Africadians, Black Canada, SlaveryAbstract
Sylvia D. Hamilton’s collection of poems And I Alone Escaped To Tell You (2014) revolves around the vindication of the little remembered legacy of slavery of Africadians – George Elliott Clarke’s neologism to refer to African Canadians from the Maritime provinces – which acts as a metaphor of the silenced history of Black Canadians. To do so, Hamilton relies on memory work through the lens of resilience and, hence, participates in the recent post-trauma paradigm that is intent on highlighting resistance rather than victimhood. Thus, the resilient memory that emerges from the collection dismisses the position of victims for Africadians and, contrarily, focuses on the capacity to ‘bounce back’, to withstand historical adversities, to endure by being malleable and to adapt to conditions of crisis. Simply put, this resilient memory acts in the poems as the dignified exercise to keep on reinstating and vindicating the silenced history of Black Canada.
Downloads
References
Akyemapog, Emmanuel. “Africans in the Diaspora: The Diaspora and Africa”. African Affairs, vol. 99, 2000, pp. 183-215. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/99.395.183
Baccolini, Raffaella. “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction”. PMLA, vol. 119, no.3, 2004, pp. 518-521. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1632/003081204X20587
Barrett, Paul. Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism. Toronto University Press, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442668959
Basseler, Michael. “Stories of Dangerous Life in the Post-Trauma Age: Towards a Critical Narratology of Resilience”. Narrative in Culture. Ed. Astrid Erll and Roy Summer. De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 15-36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110654370-002
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.
Blight, David B. “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory”. History and Memory in African-American Culture. Ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally. Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 45-71.
Bonnano, George. “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?”. American Psychologist , vol. 59,no.1, 2004, pp. 20–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20
Bracke, Sarah. “Bouncing Back. Vulnerability in Times of Resilience”. Vulnerability in Resistance. Towards a Feminist Theory of Resistance and Agency. Ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Duke Uiversity Press, 2016, pp. 52-75. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11vc78r.8
Clarke, George Elliott. Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. Pottersfield Press, 1983.
--. Odysseys Home: Mapping African Canadian Literature. University of Toronto Press, 2002. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442659865
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, 1989. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511628061
Fabre, Geneviève and Robert O’Meally, editors. History and Memory in African-American Culture. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Fleming, John and Robert J. Delogar. “Resilience, an Evolving Process: A Review Literature”. Relevant to Aboriginal Research. Pimatisiwin: A Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health, vol. 6, no. 2, 2008, pp. 7-22.
Fraile-Marcos, Ana María, editor. Glocal Narratives of Resilience. Routledge, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429291647
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford, Lwrence & Wisehart, 1990, pp. 222-237.
Hamilton, Sylvia D. “History and Memory in the African Nova Scotian Community”. Multiple Lenses Voices from the Diaspora located in Canada. Ed. David Divine, Cambridge Publishing Scholars, 2007, pp. 214-223.
--. And I Alone Escaped To Tell You. Gaspereau Press Limited, 2014.
Howard-Pitney, David. The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003.
Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. Transaction Publishers, 2007.
Luthar, Suniya S., Elizabeth Crossman, and Phillip J. Small, editors. (2015). “Resilience and adversity”. Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science Ed. Richard M. Lerner and Michael E. Lamb,Wiley, 2015, pp. 247- 286. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy307
Mannette, Joy. “Strangers in Our Homeland: To Be Black in Nova Scotia”. Cape Breton Post, 15 August: 5, 1991.
Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1969.
Medina, José. “Toward a Foucaltian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism”. Foucault Studies, vol. 12, 2011, pp. 9-35. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i12.3335
Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory”. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. Zinseer, William., 1995, pp. 83-102.
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”. Memory and Counter-Memory. Special Issue Representations, vol. 26, 1989, pp. 7-24. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520
O’Brien, Susie. “Resilience Stories: Narratives of Adaptation, Refusal, and Compromise”. Resilience Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 4.2, no. 3, 2017, pp. 43-65. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5250/resilience.4.2-3.0043
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, 2004. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226713465.001.0001
Runner, Iris Heavy and Kathy Marshall, editors. “Miracle Survivors’: Promoting Resilience in Indian Students. Tribal College Journal vol. 14, no. 4, 2003, pp. 15-18.
Siemerling, Wilfried. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History and the Presence of the Past. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
Silvera, Makeda. Her Head a Village. Press Gang Publishers, 1994.
Sontag, Susan. The Aesthetics of Silence. Aspen, vol. 5/6.3, 1967, pp. 1-21.
Tally, Justin. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Origins. Routledge, 2009. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203884706
Ward, Frederick. Riverslip: Black Memories. Tundra Books. 1974.
Ward, Frederick. The Curing Berry. Williams-Wallace, 1983.
Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada. Insomnial Press, 2003.
Walker, James. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870. University of Toronto Press, 1992. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442671447
Walker, James W. St. G. A History of Blacks in Canada. Canadian Government Publishing Center, 1980.
Winks, Robin. The Blacks in Canada: A History. McGuill-Queen’s UP, 1997.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Vicent Cucarella-Ramon
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. Also, authors will retain the rights on their work, even if they will be granting The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies a non-exclusive right of use to reproduce, edit, distribute, publicly communicate and show their work. Therefore, authors are free to engage in additional, independent contracts for non-exclusive distribution of the works published in this journal (such as uploading them to an institutional repository or publishing them in a book), as long as the fact that the manuscripts were first published in this journal is acknowledged.
